Our BMW i5 M60 Remains a Winner

• We're wrapping up a year-long test of a BMW i5 M60 sedan.
• On average, we exceeded the EPA's estimated range estimate.
• This car impressed us over the course of 12 months — even if it wasn't perfect.

What we got

While Edmunds often purchases vehicles for use in our One-Year Road Test fleet, this i5 M60 xDrive was loaned to us by BMW for the purposes of evaluation. Our car was a nearly fully loaded example of the i5 M60, with 21-inch wheels, Espresso Brown leather, carbon fiber trim and approximately a million useful driver-assistance functions. All in, our car cost $95,745 including destination.

"BMW has been producing some of the best interiors in the auto industry as of late, and our i5 is the perfect example of that," wrote senior features editor Clint Simone. "You can poke and press on any panel and they all feel rock solid. ... The glossy carbon fiber across the dash looks fantastic, as does the ornate strip of ambient lighting. Little details like the glass control wheel on the center console make things even better."

Not everyone loved the glass accents, though. Director of written content Brent Romans noted: "The knob can turn into a very bright and annoying reflector of sunlight when the sun is at certain angles. The black plastic surrounding it also reflects sunlight and easily shows smudgy fingerprints and cabin dust. Ew."

What we liked

Everyone was pleased with our car's powertrain, which consisted of an 81.2-kWh (usable) battery and two electric motors producing a combined 593 horsepower and 586 lb-ft of torque. When we took the i5 to our test track, we recorded a 0-60 mph sprint of just 3.6 seconds, and the M60 xDrive ran the quarter mile in 11.5 seconds at 122.1 mph. Those are numbers normally reserved for serious sports cars — ditto the i5's 0.95-g skid pad figure.

"Power delivery in this car is just so perfectly judged," said video content manager Will Kaufman. "No matter what the traffic or road conditions, it felt entirely intuitive to get exactly the acceleration I wanted, and transitions are entirely smooth. It's exactly what I want from a luxury car with some performance cred."

​​Romans again: "I had my teenage daughter in the car with me recently and I did a short demo. I whipped around a turn, planted the pedal once the front wheels were pointed straight and kept it going to a speed I won't mention here. After I left off, she remarked, 'Wow! It's so quiet, and it just whooshes.' She paused, and added, 'It's like an assassin. It's just there and gone before you know it.'"

The i5's range impressed us; over the course of a year, we saw an average of 248 miles per charge, which beats the EPA's estimate of 240 miles. When we ran the i5 on the Edmunds EV Range Test, we saw an even better result: 256 miles. Sure, we'd have liked that number to be higher overall, but it was great to see our car continuously outperform the EPA's rating.

The i5 was also super-duper quiet. How quiet? Romans chimed in: "Quiet as a mouse? Quiet as a tomb? Quiet as a mouse in a tomb for mute librarians? Whatever, it's quiet. I looked up our sound decibel test numbers on our i5. It was a little quieter at standstill than a gas-powered Mercedes E-Class, which makes sense because it's electric. The two luxury sedans had similar measurements when driving at 70 mph (65.5 db for the i5 compared to 62.6 db for the E-Class). Point is, it's very quiet, and that makes it easy to hold a conversation with your passenger or enjoy the details of your music."

What we didn't like

Simply put: the tech. And we didn't just have gripes about the infotainment system — the driver-assistance functions drew ire from our team, too.

"The i5's menu structure is not intuitive and looks like someone just added a bunch of apps but did not organize or categorize them in any kind of meaningful way," wrote executive director of written content Jodi Tourkow. "The result for me was spending lots of time trying to navigate throughout the applications to try and find a certain setting I was looking for." 

Tourkow also had issues with the BMW's scheduled charging function. "When I would attempt to schedule a charging time of 11:00 p.m. on my Level 2 home charger, the BMW i5 would not allow me to do so unless I also put in a departure time. So, my two options were to select 'charge immediately' or add a departure time. I tried to override this multiple times. Being required to schedule even an arbitrary departure time just so I can charge the vehicle seems irrelevant."

"This car's menu and settings structure feels like the kind of UX solution you'd get if you trained an AI on the interfaces of '90s cellphones and homebrew Linux desktops, then asked it to make a touchscreen system based on the concept of 'app store functionality,'" wrote Kaufman.

Senior features editor Clint Simone had some trouble with the driver-assistance suite, too. "I activated the Highway Assistant on the freeway while driving in direct sunlight. With some pretty severe glare coming through the windshield, the car was tricked. The system turned off multiple times and did a poor job of staying in the lane when it was operating. It was the first time that I didn't feel confident using this technology."

A final issue: the i5's trunk space. "BMW says the i5 has a 17.3-cubic-foot trunk," noted Romans. "Based on that spec alone, you'd think the i5 has a pretty big trunk. A Honda Accord, for example, has a 16.7 cubic-foot trunk. In real-world use, however, I've found that our i5's trunk doesn't live up to that 17.3-cube promise. The height of the trunk is short and the overall shape doesn't allow you to fit bulkier items (such as suitcases) nearly as easy as it should be. The i5 doesn't have a truly useful rear trunk underfloor storage bin like you get in the Lucid Air or Tesla Model S, either."

Our final verdict

Small complaints aside, we generally loved our year with the i5. We found it to be more well-rounded than competitors like a Mercedes-Benz EQE or Tesla Model S, and it held up extremely well — we only had to take it in for service once, and it was because the car was involved in a crash. Mechanically, the i5 was flawless, though we did notice a tear in the driver's seat near the end of our year-long loan. The M60 badge on the trunk was starting to come off, too.

The one downside to our year with the i5 was something we didn't necessarily feel the brunt of, but an owner might. We had our car appraised at the end of its 12-month, 10,000-mile test, and were offered a trade-in value of just $56,000. Considering our car cost nearly $96,000 new, that's a running cost of $4 per mile. Not great.

Would we welcome the i5 back into our One-Year Road Test fleet again? Absolutely, without question. Aside from a few small nitpicks, the i5 was flawless — quick, quiet, luxurious and easy to live with day to day. It won the Edmunds Top Rated Electric Car award in 2024, and a full year later, we absolutely stand by that decision.

Photos by Tyler Clemmensen